Industrial Era Capitalism was great for the PAST and it worked in that context; however, today we are obliged to build a system for the NEXT 50, 100, 200 years; bringing to bear the best of our collective intelligence, quantitative rigor, and intuitive forecasting capabilities, moving forward. For more than 50 years America's best and brightest have called for unconditional #BasicIncome. It's time to join them. Here's why.

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Do a little googling in various time frames for the quoted phrase "unsustainable resource skews" and you will find that we began signaling this particular message from approximately April 2007. So, it may have taken a little over three years to really reach mainstream exposure, but every single character typed in every single random forum and chat session, adding just one more voice to the rising global chorus for change, has been worth it.

That said, over the intervening time, many of us have come to the conclusion that there may ultimately be no other way of addressing what NPR has fleshed out as overwhelmingly unsustainable Income Inequality, or Slate's expose series on The United States of Inequality, or the New York Time's mandate for Confronting Income Inequality, other than to make the entire unsustainably skewed system completely irrelevant.

The institutional pathology just runs too deep and the hoarding dementia at the helm is impossible to reason with. If Warren Buffet can't get through, who can? It's pointless to confront people who are incapable of comprehending their own mental illness, or who refuse to adjust their world view to the empirical data right before their very eyes. They're fixated on a particular perception and to hell with facts.

We also may not need to resort to dramatic measures like rapidly aggressive taxation. For one, that wouldn't really make for structural change; it just moves around the deck chairs on the Titanic.

So let's leave the demented to continue living in their make believe world a little longer, while we go about the business of accelerating adaptation for the real world that the rest of us live in. Things will fall apart gradually all around them; they won't understand what's gone wrong; and by the point that they do notice there will not be much empathy left for that world view because when we gave it the opportunity to change, it decided to dig in with a rabid, foaming, snarling, Mine, Mine, Mine, Mine, Mine, Mine, Mine. Since the Objectivists among that number would be first and foremost to say, "we all choose our own fate," then apparently the 95% of us at the bottom can see precisely the fate chosen by an economically sociopathological 5% of the population.

If you were numbered among that 5% and made the decision was to dig in with what you got, then when the rest of the 95% of us unilaterally decide that what you got is worthless, do you see how that works, now? Oops, too late.

There are extraordinary new efforts underway and proven programs that have been a quarter century or more in the making that could essentially obviate the entire current economic fiction. When the time comes, the transition can be done relatively quickly, with little or no social unrest because 95% of people will be instantly better off and only 5% will be raging like lunatics; at which point, we will all indeed see pathological hoarders for what they've always been: snarling demented sociopaths; literally, people who lack a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience; and in extreme cases, even while paying lip service to those very principles.

Look, nobody is saying that "all rich people are demented." That's absurd. Anyone who has read this space with any frequency knows that's nothing even remotely close to the point. The sad problem is that there is a large enough number of textbook-defined clinical sociopaths in that 5% that we may have no other choice but to simply move forward without them.

So maybe this provides something of a definition for the "++" that some have asked me about, wondering what precisely that means. It means we simply leave the previous iteration behind. It's broken, don't fix it. Leave it on the side of the road and walk on. No big conflict. No big votes. Just move on. We'll figure it out.

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Buckminster Fuller

Martin Luther King Jr.

"We are demanding an emergency program to provide employment for everyone in need of a job, or if a work program is impractical, a guaranteed annual income at levels that sustain life and decent circumstance. It is now incontestable that the wealth and resources of the United States make the elimination of poverty absolutely practical." - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? 1967.